Monday, May 15, 2006

Gas-saving products

There are dozens of products on the market that claim to "save gas" and "dramatically increase your miles per gallon." This article provides a nice summary of their effectiveness in these couple of sentences:

The myriad devices on the market work in a variety of ways: bleeding air into the carburetor, heating the fuel, enhancing the vaporization of the air-fuel mixture, to name a few. In 2005, Consumer Reports tested three products — Tornado, Fuel Genie and Platinum Gas Saver, with prices ranging from $70 to $119 a pop — and found that none of them enhanced fuel economy significantly. "The EPA recommends strong skepticism for consumers, because in our experience these things just don't work," Millett said. "If they worked, cars would be built that way anyway."

The "MythBusters" on The Discovery Channel recently aired an episode on gas saving techniques and devices. Their premise was that the automotive and petrol industries were in cahoots to "force" an ineffective combustion method on consumers to sustain high petrol prices. The MythBusters found this to be a fallacy. Although, they did prove that a diesel engine + filtered vegetable oil from your local restaurant = a cheap ride.